The fusion of Arts and Technology can inspire change and galvanize collective action.
I believe in harnessing the best of showmanship and technology to create an extraordinary experience that you will never forget because you changed a little bit of the world and you with it.
We live in a time when everyone is vying for our attention: dings, pings, rings, from our inbox, notifications, social media, bait and click ads, news, bad news, fake news … you name it. It has become increasingly hard to focus and make sense of the world around us, let alone take meaningful actions.
Nonetheless, this interconnected network is giving us unprecedented access to knowledge. With this instant access to information, comes a sense of civic duty and human responsibility. I get daily emails from organizations I care about and subscribe to all asking for my help. It’s wonderful and can also be too much. I feel guilty if I don’t sign X petition or read Y email. The truth is: I don’t always have the time, I am not always in the right state of mind and I don’t always understand the issue.
You might say " Natasha, the world is getting better!" And you are right. But a third of it still does not have access to clean drinking water. There's so much plastic in the ocean we are naming sea creatures after it. The rainforest is barreling toward a point of no return. Our air's in trouble. 1 in 8 species on Earth are facing extinction. Inequality and Systemic racism are rampant. We are mad as hell, and somehow we are taking it. Of course, it’s not all gloom and doom, there are heroes out there, individuals, foundations, organizations, social entrepreneurs championing local problems and global challenges.
Peter Diamandis, chairman of the Xprize Foundation, said: “We already have the technology required to meet these challenges. Our innovations may have caught up with our problems. What we need now is the willpower and collective action of people.” We need the rest of us!
I believe the fusion of Arts and Technology can inspire change and galvanize collective action. What if a show, live or online, could positively impact a billion people? And I don’t mean emotionally, I mean actionably. Because, if one of super powers of entertainment, is the ability to synchronize the hearts and minds of an audience. Then what if we could convert the energy and emotions generated during the experience into tangible actions that have positive impact and scale that?
Think of Benefit concerts. These are powerful movements, but few and far in between. Today, we can digitize the process and gamify the experience, where calls to action are built within a story, and the story can be dynamic and respond to current events.
My team and I have created a blueprint for digitizing and gamifying entertainment to generate and maximize positive collective action. Think movie with social impact gaming embedded at its core. Where every single click you take throughout the experience has an immediate and positive impact.
To quote Fred Cook, director, USC Center for Public Relations "We are witnessing the democratization of activism: today’s activists are everyday citizens united in their desire to create real change, using modern communication systems to influence the decision making process". Across cultures and generations, when people care, they give, they rally, they unite.
There is everything to rethink about storytelling, narratives, art making, everything really. And it may not all work out. But we won’t know until we break old models and create new ones. We’ve been stuck in a climate of repeats and remakes. It's time to invent and craft new and better realities.
Today, we are celebrating our shared humanity and creativity, that transcends geographical boundaries in an isolated world. But we are not isolated. What Covid-19 is showing us is how interconnected we are. All of us. Despite the distance, man made boundaries and politics. We are all the same in the face of pandemics and environmental catastrophes. We are the united people of the planet. And we each have the creative responsibility of making the world more beautiful. More meaningful. And better than how we leave it.
So let’s!
Creatively Yours,
Natasha
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